January 9, 2018: We need a gov’t for our benefit

JPost readers sound off on the week's top events.

Dear Reader,
As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before.
Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications,
like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations,
we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open
and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news
and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.

With regard to “Israel recommends US gradually cut aid to UNRWA” (January 7), why do we need to ask the US to gradually cut aid? This should have been done long ago. UNRWA only creates problems – mainly for us, but also for the people it is there to provide for.

Whether we do or whether we don’t, we are still damned! Why delay actions? Our situation in the world only deteriorates.

As for “Palestinians attack car of Greek patriarch in protest against land deals” (January 7), the patriarch has also been targeted by Arab Israelis. Do we need these people? They should be deported in order for us to have a population that does not breed hate.

Please have our government act for our benefit, not to our detriment!

S. GELGOR
Tel Aviv

Interpersonal rubbish

Once again, the residents of Jerusalem, including yours truly, found themselves held captive – better yet, prisoners – as we were forced to experience a filthy, health-endangering repeat performance of a comprehensive work stoppage of city services for the second year in a row (“Jerusalem city workers announce general strike,” January 7).

Both figuratively and literally, the innocent public, the tax paying citizens of what is supposed to be the “capital city,” Israel’s shining citadel and seat of government, were made to suffer and pay the price for a game of “King of the Mountain” between two attention-seeking politicians, Mayor Nir Barkat and Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon.

Both share an ultimate goal of becoming center-stage leaders on the national level. They seem to have forgotten the voting public. The word “inconvenience” doesn’t capture the impact of this strike.

We must ask ourselves: With the core challenges involving Jerusalem’s tax base, demographic composition, budgetary process, program growth, infrastructure needs and funding arrangements – all of which have been brought to light on multiple occasions over the years – what has been done? What was not known months ago about the state of the budget and the lack of cooperation between Barkat and Kahlon, including their personal dislike for each other, that could have prevented this painful outcome?

Should we have been expected to wait for days until the mountain of garbage became repulsive in odor and volume as the vermin took over and a health crisis became reality, as occurred in 2017? Will our prime minister, health minister and other national figures sit on the sidelines until the political heat gets turned up? Where is the City Council?

Perhaps the time has come for intensive, nightly protests in front of the homes of Kahlon and Barkat – where each protester could leave a small bag of rubbish as a reminder that this interpersonal rubbish must end now!

SIDNEY (SHOLOM) STRAJCHER
Jerusalem

A seditious column?

While I fully support and respect The Jerusalem Post’s mission of providing a balanced and diverse representation of opinions, I strongly feel that Gershon Baskin’s “If I were a Palestinian” (Encountering Peace, January 4) crossed a very important line that both the Post and the prosecutorial authorities in Israel should strongly consider.

Baskin wrote: “For all of this, Israel will respond by arresting people – that is exactly what I would want to happen. Every single Palestinian who sees themselves as a leader should have the goal of getting arrested. Israeli prisons should be full so that Israel needs to build tent cities of prison camps for Palestinians.”

Such a statement is no less than direct and overt incitement for Palestinians to break Israeli law. At best, it is considered aiding, abetting, conspiring and procuring, which are well defined offenses. At worst, encouraging what most observers would consider to be an enemy population to act in open defiance of one’s own county to the extent that the offenders would be thrown in jail should be considered an act of sedition.

It is one thing to harbor these feelings or discuss them privately, but that Baskin would have the temerity to make this one of the central themes of a piece in a widely circulated newspaper shows how little respect the radical Left has for Israel’s sovereignty and rule of law.

With a son in a combat unit who would be on the front lines of dealing with the results of such incitement, I take personal offense. While Baskin tries to lecture the Palestinians with how they should resist peacefully (“everyone should resist, without violence, in order to be arrested”), even the casual observer is well aware that the Palestinians’ inclination when it comes to resistance is, regrettably, something entirely different from Baskin’s naïve view.

GARY DAVID
Modi’in

Response to responses

From the responses to my letter published on December 18 (“An absurdity to be challenged”), it seems there is a great deal of misinformation.

Reader Avraham Berkovits (“Readers weigh in on the matter of Messianic Jews,” Letters, December 20) claimed that the name “Yeshua” was not the original Hebrew, being invented by Messianic Jews, and that the real name of Jesus was “Yeshu.”

It seems Mr. Berkovits is totally unaware that “Ye-sh-u” is actually a curse invented by those who hated Yeshua, an acronym for yimhak sh’mo v’zichrono – may his name and memory be blotted out. (What parents would use that curse to name their baby?) This can be easily authenticated by a Google search.

Google goes on to say that Yeshua in Hebrew is a verbal derivative of “to rescue” or “to deliver.” Among the Jews of the Second Temple period, the Aramaic/Hebrew name Yeshua was common.

Reader Alfred Inselberg (“Additional readers weigh in on Messianic Jews,” Letters, December 24) questioned the Jewishness of Yeshua because his mother’s genealogy is unknown.

First of all, the genealogy of Miriam is presented in the Gospel of Luke. She was a descendant of David. Through Yeshua’s adoptive father, Joseph, whose genealogy is presented in the Gospel of Matthew, came the inheritance and claim to kingship, also of the line of David and Judah.

In addition to that, perhaps unknown to most Jewish people today, Jewishness is biblically inherited through the father, not the mother. Rabbinical Judaism has distorted this clear truth and claims inheritance is through the mother, yet our God is the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, not Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel! Finally, reader Stanley Cohen (Letters, December 24), compared Messianic Jews to the “sons of famous rabbis who are supporters of Hamas.”

I have no clue who these traitorous sons of famous rabbis might be, but to claim that Jewish believers in Yeshua are calling for the destruction of Israel is libelous. Unlike the sons and daughters of many ultra-Orthodox families, the sons and daughters of Jewish believers in Yeshua gladly and honorably serve in the IDF, many of them being promoted to officer rank. They and their parents work for a living and contribute to the economy of their beloved nation.
TERRI MOREY
Poriya Illit

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